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The Fantasy of Geography

By

James Bowman

Updated Aug. 14, 1996 12:01 a.m. ET

With 247 pages behind us and 269 to go in Malcolm Bradbury's "Dangerous Pilgrimages: Transatlantic Mythologies and the Novel" (Viking, 515 pages, $32.95), we come upon the following introduction to Chapter Seven: "'So the twentieth century had come it began with 1901,' wrote Gertrude Stein, with her usual simple sagacity, in her late book Paris France (1940)." Suddenly the reader's will to go on is shattered--not only by Stein's stunning banality but by the author's approval of it. But then Mr. Bradbury himself is engaged in a rather Steinian exercise. He has thrown everything he knows into this...